Anthony Paul

“In spite of ups and downs, the union between Jacques and Marguerite remained essential and indestructible. Nothing could undermine it over the forty-eight years of their life together. According to Avital Ronell, ‘Marguerite never considered anyone to be a rival. She always had something nice to say about the women who were close or too close to Jacques, which does not mean that she did not suffer because of them.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“When he read the text for the first time, Alan Bass, who was far from being a novice, had the impression that it would be as complicated as trying to translate Joyce into French. Derrida acknowledged that the ‘Envois’ were very encrypted and agreed to provide Bass with explanations, comments, and suggestions whenever required. ‘Most of this work was done by letter,’ Alan Bass recalls. He would send me my pages back with many annotations. But we had at least one long session together in a railway station buffet, while he was between trains. There were many details that would have escaped my notice if he hadn’t drawn my attention to them. For example, in the sentence ‘Est-ce taire un nom?’ [‘Is this to keep silence about a name?’], you also have to read ‘Esther’, which is one of the forenames of his mother, but also a biblical name that plays a very active part in the book. In spite of all my efforts, many of these effects disappeared in the translation.15 Hans-Joachim Metzger, the German translator of The Post Card, would find the work equally demanding. ‘On reading your questions,’ Derrida wrote to him, ‘I see yet again that you have read the text better than I have. That’s why a translator is absolutely unbearable, and the better he is, the scarier he is: the super-ego in person.”
― Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography

“Metaphors are dangerous. Calling something by a false name changes it, and metaphor is just a fancy way of calling something by a false name.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen